In the simplest terms, the job of a RevOps person or team is to make revenue go up — but without direct customer contact. In other words, RevOps is responsible for all the behind the scenes work to optimize every stage of the GTM process and ensure that cross-functional teams are doing what they need to do to drive revenue.
So how do you know your SaaS business is ready for RevOps? And, when it is, how can you make an internal case to build out your RevOps function?
In a recent webinar, 5 Strategies to Scale Up RevOps Teams and Tech Stacks, we tackled this question and other strategies for scaling up RevOps teams and tech stacks. The panel included RevOps experts Mollie Bodensteiner, VP Operations at Sound Agriculture; David Ma, VP of GTM Strategy and Ops at Zip; and Prakash Raina, Co-Founder at Subskribe.
Read on for the group’s best advice for making the case for RevOps.
The Role of a RevOps Leader
RevOps integrates within GTM along the entire quote-to-revenue process. They are responsible for partnering with sales, marketing, customer success, and more to increase revenue, drive efficiencies, and improve the customer experience.
For example, if there's an issue with lead gen, RevOps can go to the marketing leader to partner on improving lead volume. Or if the middle funnel seems to have a kink that indicates a sales execution problem, RevOps can go speak with sales leaders. Or if customer retention is slipping (and/or the company is missing opportunities to cross-sell and upsell), RevOps can work with customer success teams to solve for this side of the revenue equation.
A RevOps leader may not have ownership over these functions, but their role is to find projects to partner on and to work with the relevant leaders to improve those functions.
If you’re seeing breakdowns at any stage of the funnel — or opportunities to optimize the funnel — it’s time for RevOps.
Offer Value Proactively
If you want to dive into RevOps, there are so many points in the hand-offs between functions within GTM where the ability to view the big picture is incredibly relevant.
If you go to anybody in your organization and say that you can bring some value to the process or the data or how something is measured — who wouldn’t be open to that prospect? If you can find a way to work with leaders on projects and add value to their particular processes, they’re going to be receptive. Everyone is open to help from somebody who’s thinking about a problem the right way — that is, broadly and not limited by silos.
You have to pick and choose areas of opportunity and do the job before the function of RevOps formally exists and before you have a relevant title. And over time, if you can partner across the GTM function to influence revenue then you can show there’s value in having someone in this “go-between” role to make an impact throughout go to market.
Run an “Assessment”
An extension of the “faking it until you make it” tactic is to run an assessment. The foundation for this assessment should be some goal setting: what are the three things you need to do in order to achieve the next level of revenue growth or achieve the next revenue target?
What you will quickly see is that a cross-functional effort will be needed to hit these goals — and yet there is likely not a single person who can (or will!) take ownership. Marketing will look at the problem from their own perspective. Finance will focus on their thing. And Sales will be preoccupied with their own view.
You can play the role of RevOps, taking responsibility for achieving the goal, and making sure that all the action items across all functions actually gets done.
RevOps in Action
Even though RevOps is so clearly a value-add at every stage of a company’s development — from startup to IPO — sometimes it’s hard to make the case to build out the function, and get the headcount you need.
Ultimately, it comes down to impact. From jumping in and partnering cross-functionally, you should be able to demonstrate impact both qualitatively and quantitatively. You can measure and share out revenue metrics (new and existing customers). And all the GTM teams will attest to efficiency gains with the help of a supporting — and guiding — RevOps function.
Learn more about scaling RevOps teams and tech stacks and how to get the RevOps tools you need.
